Xtreme Assault"The Making of the Xbox" is one of the most interesting and profound
examinations
of Microsoft and the gaming industry I've ever encountered (Wired
9.11, page 142).

The piece reveals a world of massive cost- and time-management strategies
- companies that never sleep and persuade their suppliers to live under
the same roof. It's a timely story for the tech sector, pinpointing the
role of realization over innovation.

And this is a turning point for Microsoft as it looks beyond software and
pushes harder to produce a physical product. True, the company sells
peripherals,
but aside from its talking Barney, launched many years back, it hasn't
managed to create any innovative hardware.

I'm impressed Microsoft's strategy was painted not only as a foray into
a lucrative new market but as pivotal to sustainability. You say that the
company's "hidden hope" is to give developers a reason to write for PCs
by bringing them in on the Xbox. I think it's far from hidden - it's one
of Redmond's most critical strategies, especially since we don't truly
know what the company will do (with its software) once it has developers
onboard. Microsoft as a gaming giant? Could be.

Mexican border towns have become garbage dumps for millions of barrels
of benzine solvents, pesticides, raw sewage, and battery acid spewed out
by foreign-owned maquiladoras. The companies dump toxins
into landfills, rivers, populated canyons, and storm drains. Sewer systems
are now so inadequate that raw fecal matter flows freely into wells used
for drinking and irrigation. Constant exposure to untreated sewage means
that hepatitis, vibrio cholera, and amoebic dysentery are widespread.

These companies may "cut 75 percent of the price of labor" -
by breaking a culture apart with atrociously low wages and a complete disregard
for its environmental and social surroundings.

Up With PeopleDan Baum's article "The Ultimate Jam Session" (Wired 9.11,
page 170) has much hope for a brave new world of transportation free of
the people factor. It's fun and informative, but the research might have
reached back a bit.

Susan Shaheen is probably the first serious entrant in the public sector
with CarLink, but one hopes her doctoral dissertation gives the credit
to Bill Alden. He developed the idea 45 years earlier while a student at
Harvard Business School. Following graduation in 1952, Alden financed his
own startup. He failed, as have his private-sector successors, because
efficiently matching up people with cars and locations has proved to be
an utterly imperfect task.

Edward de Bono's treatise is valid, but you misreport the elevator story.
The engineer was George C. Sziklai, a distinguished scientist at RCA who
was the sole inventor of color television and hundreds of other now-common
electronic devices. Later, at Westinghouse, Sziklai invented the high-speed
elevator. Making it go fast was no great shakes; slowing it down without
killing the passengers was the trick. That's what Sziklai did. The first
were installed in the Seagram Building decades before the de Bono treatise.

Field of DreamsRegarding "The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test" (Wired
9.11, page 106): During the summer of 1999, I was asked by a staff member
of Media Fusion to consider working for the company as a consultant. I
attended an event in San Diego with Luke Stewart and a select gathering
of top physicists, the Jason Group. In discussions prior to his presentation,
Stewart indicated that his technology, among other things, could send data
at speeds exceeding the speed of light.

During the presentation, Stewart refused to answer many questions on the
grounds that the technology was proprietary. He declined to discuss his
patent on the same grounds. At one point, Stewart made reference to signals
that resulted from distant lightning strikes being transmitted over power
lines. Incredibly, he said that such signals from South Africa had been
picked up on North American transmission lines. (Since when are these grids
connected?!)
After the meeting, I informed Media Fusion that I believed its technology
to be bogus. Stewart's technology is 100 percent unworkable, and yet he
may actually believe his own hype. To convince others of its value, believing
in it yourself is almost a requirement.

Three years ago, I met a similar inventor who came along looking for funding
- only he could use magnetic fields to carry signals through phone lines
all the way across a state at hundreds of megabits per second. Amazingly,
it did work in field trials, even though the electrical signals were converted
to light at the first fiber node, completely wiping out the magnetic field.
A number of investors dove in - but we did a simple test (unplugged the
gadget from the phone wiring) and it still worked! Turns out the poor sucker
had reinvented FM radio, and his miracle modem was sending out radio waves
through the air, not through the cable. More amazing still, two weeks after
this revelation, he was in a car accident and the collision caused severe
amnesia, preventing him from re-creating his circuits. To think running
a red light denied society the benefits of this outstanding intellect.
As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

The Rest CureHow wonderfully creative of Bill Reed to bring together seniors and technology
to the benefit of both ("Technogenarians," Wired 9.11,
page 186) - and how disappointing the gap between seniors' living options
and the media. To refer to supportive community housing as a "rest home"
is comparable to my mother's fear of living out her years in an "old-age
home." Neither concept exists in the jargon or in the reality of today's
senior housing and cannot be defined interchangeably with assisted living,
nursing homes, or Alzheimer's homes. Government licensing defines these
three categories, setting parameters for how much caregivers can do for
a resident and, in some cases, the amount of training they need.

A bit of research regarding the defining norms for senior housing would
have revealed how truly innovative Oatfield Estates is, not just because
of technology, but because of resident empowerment, something sorely lacking
in senior-care housing in the US.